Göran Sonesson, “Semiotics of Photography: the State of the Art.”

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283836663 Semiotics of Photography: The State of the Art Article · May 2015 DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-9404-6_19 CITATIONS READS 7 3,174 1 author: Göran Sonesson Lund University 101 PUBLICATIONS 714 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: Stages in the Evolution and Development of Sign Use (SEDSU) View project Centre for Cognitive Semiotics (CCS) View project All content following this page was uploaded by Göran Sonesson on 18 November 2015. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. Chapter 19 Semiotics of Photography: The State of the Art Göran Sonesson Semiotics studies the similarities and differences of different kinds of signs and meanings. Thus, it is important to know that the photograph is a kind of sign, that it is an iconical sign, perhaps also an indexical sign, and that, more specifically, it is a pictorial sign. For all those things photographs share with other signs, icons, indices, and pictures, we have to account when discussing these categories of meaning (cf. Sonesson 2010). Here, I will try to pinpoint those properties that are specific to photography. It does not follow, however, that the specificity of photography cannot derive, at least in part, from it being a peculiar kind of icon, or a peculiar kind of index, or perhaps both. In earlier works (e.g. Sonesson 1988, 1992), I have distinguished three ways of categorizing picture signs: the constructions types, i.e. those picture categories which differ in the way expression and content are related in the sign, as, for instance, photographs using compact surfaces to stand for the parts of perceptual objects, and outline drawings using contours and pigments to represent the edges of objects in the perceptual world; the means/ends categories, which are characterized by their (socially intended) effects, as publicity pictures, news pictures, caricatures, pornographic pictures, and so on; and the channel divisions, which derive their identity criteria from the social channels by means of which the pictures are cir- culated, as, for instance, picture postcards, posters, graffiti, and so on. Of course, many real-world categories suppose a cumulating of such distinctions, as is noto- riously the case with works of art. It should be noted that all these categories are functional, which is fairly obvious in the case of channel divisions and means/ends categories, which derive, in two different ways, from the places occupied by the classes of pictures in the social network. These are extrinsic functions; but from the Prague school point of view, there are also intrinsic functions, such as the sign function, on which our construction types are variations; and to Hjelmslev, the sign function is the essential function. G. Sonesson () Centre for Cognitive Semiotics, Lund University, Lund, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015 417 P. P. Trifonas (ed.), International Handbook of Semiotics, DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-9404-6_19 418 G. Sonesson The case of photography, however, is peculiar, since, unlike most other pictures categories (except perhaps comics), it has been thoroughly discussed within semiotics in its own right. Some early semioticians, like Barthes and Moles, still admit- ted a straightforward motivational link joining the two relata of the pictorial sign together, and thus felt the need to demonstrate the exceptionally strong character of this motivation in the case of photography. Eco, on the other hand, treated the case of photography as being on a par with other pictures, which, at the time, he claimed to be as arbitrary as verbal signs; and Lindekens formulated such an argument ex- plicitly, even employing experiments to prove his case. More recently, a third move- ment has distinctly emerged, suggesting the peculiarly of the photograph to reside in its indexical nature. This is the argument of at least three excellent monographs on photographic semiotics, those of Vanlier, Dubois, and Schaeffer; and the same thesis is hinted at in the works of Rosalind Krauss, Delord, and others. In fact, even Peirce himself entertained this idea in some passages of his prolific but fragmentary work. Indeed, this at first seems an exceptionally satisfactory solution, believing, as I do, that the photograph is a particular construction variant of the pictorial sign function: the photographic sign would differ from other picture signs, which are mainly grounded in icons, by being based on another one of the three elementary sign types, the index; and this would bring the issue of photography very much to the core of sign theory. But if we take the idea as far as Vanlier and Dubois have done, we may wonder if there is still something left to account for the common picturehood of the two sign types; in fact, the photographic sign would not really be a variant of the picture sign, but of an altogether different nature. Moreover, even if, following Schaeffer, we take a somewhat more conciliatory stance, declaring the photograph to be an indexical icon, this solution may not really be one: for we are left to account for the differences between photographic indices and all the other indices of which the world is pro- fused in, and of which some may happen to be picture signs other than photographs (cf. Sonesson 1989a, p. 49 ff., 1989b). In particular, if, as Krauss claims, postmod- ern painting transfers the indexical principle of photography to other arts, then we should have to explain why these works are so far from resembling photographs. The first section of this essay on photographic semiotics contains a general sur- vey of what has been accomplished so far in this domain. In the second section, I have pursued the question of the indexical nature of photography, as it has been studied in a number of outstanding monographs, which, in the end, I have sug- gested to be basically mistaken, as was already indicated in a number of my earlier publications. 19.1 A Short History of Photographic Semiotics Like most other particular strains making up the history of pictorial semiotics, this one begins with Barthes. In fact, Barthes’s earliest text treating of pictures (apart from the more casual glosses of Barthes 1957) is a short text (Barthes 1961) en- 19 Semiotics of Photography: The State of the Art 419 titled “Le message photographique”. It is true, however, that already the first line of the article discloses its concern with press photographs more in particular. Also Barthes’s second article on pictorial semiotics, a real classic of the domain, “La rhétorique de l’image” (Barthes 1964a), is about a photograph, the one showing Panzani spaghetti and other kindred products offered for sale in the shape of a mar- ket goer’s still life (cf. Sonesson 1989a, p. 114 ff.). 19.1.1 Some Issues of Barthesian Semiotics Both these articles introduce the Saussurean, or more exactly Hjelmslevian, frame- work of Barthesian semiology, the first being somewhat closer to the source, at least as far as the notion of connotation is concerned. While the first presents us with a series of rather general reflections, resulting from the attempt to apply the Hjelmslevian model of a two-layered semiotic system to pictures, the second is, at least apparently, a regular text analysis concerned with one particular photograph, defined both as to its means/ends category (publicity) and, somewhat more loosely, its channel division (magazine picture). Even the first of these texts (Barthes 1982, p. 11) proclaims the famous Barthesian paradox, according to which the photograph is a message deprived of a code (but the term “photographie” alternates in the same paragraph, as if this were the same thing, with the more general term “image”;1 and this conception is formulated with reference to the more peculiar phenomenon “photographie de presse”; this being perhaps the only idea which Barthes would still accept in his last book (Barthes 1980), which is also concerned with photographs (but mostly with a more private photographic genre, family portraits) and which is no longer a book of semiotics (also cf. Delord 1986). No ideas of Barthes’s have been more fateful than his total misunderstanding of the Hjelmslevian distinction between denotation and connotation. As I have shown elsewhere, Hjelmslev is really concerned with a kind of indirect meaning, or con- textual implication, resulting from the choice of one expression for a content, when other would have been possible, or from a particular way of conveying such an expression, when others are available (cf. Sonesson 1989a, p. 113 ff.). Barthes, on the other hand, took this distinction to concern subjective versus objective meaning, and this can never be made operational, has been endemic to all of pictorial semiotics, including photographic semiotics, since then. 1 In Barthes (1964a see Barthes 1982, p. 34 f.) photography, as a message without a code is actu- ally opposed to drawing, which is supposedly three times coded. It is a curious fact that Barthes’s acceptance of a convention theory as far as (all?) pictures that are not photographs are concerned is never noted in the literature, where Barthes is often supposed to be a defender of naive analogism generally. Interestingly, convention is here not identified with the presence of features, double ar- ticulation, and the like, as even Eco (1968) initially thought necessary, only to retract himself later (Eco 1976), and as Lindekens (1971, 1976) continued to assume. We will return below to the three reasons Barthes adduces for the drawing being coded. 420 G.

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